Sun Closing MySQL?

First Sun Microsystems purchases the open source database system MySQL for $1 billion a few months ago. Then Sun and Ubuntu are in the proverbial bed together (which is awesome by the way). Now Sun is close sourcing part of MySQL? It's not as bad as you think.

When I first read this today, I though "Oh great, there goes the LAMP stack, now I'll have to migrate all my web apps over to PostgreSQL or something". Then I actually read some articles and blog postings about it. Turns out it's not as bad as I initially thought.

The parts that they are closing (at least the parts that have so far been announced as going to be closed). As stated for MySQL 6.0, there is supposed to be an online backup system added to MySQL as one of the features. But now, the "community" (read: free) version is going to have basic backup functionality. The paid for, enterprise edition also has the basic backup functionality, but they also get compression and encryption.

Sun Microsystems has stated that there will be API's available so developers can build their own functionality on top of MySQL. So what's wrong with this? Nothing really. Why? Look at the Red Hat camp. They charge money for an open source version of linux, but the majority of the money you pay goes towards support (they have various different levels of support) and so does MySQL. They have the community version which is free with community support. And they also have the enterprise version of MySQL which you get the Enterprise Manager and support (again, various levels of support).

So what now? From what I've read, this is just pretty standard stuff really. Sun paid a lot of money for a piece of great software, and now they are working on getting their money back over the long run. And I for one am OK with what they are doing. Now if they decide to close source the majority of the back end system of MySQL to the point of how it is no longer free (close sourcing or releasing under a different license), then I would have a problem and then would seriously consider switching databases, but only time will tell.